Restricted to three hours per session. No available servers in Asia, Latin America. Need paid version to get Mac or mobile support, multi-device support. Help page does not always load. Strange behavior when trying to connect automatically.

Bottom Line

While CyberGhost VPN is Europe-centric with only a handful of US servers, it does the job effectively with minimal ads and without a significant performance drop. With a slick professional-looking interface and a decent selection of servers, CyberGhost VPN is the free VPN service you've been looking for. This review and rating focuses on the free version of CyberGhost VPN, which is limited to one Windows device.

CyberGhost VPN is a personal VPN service that is easy to use, hides your online activity from eavesdroppers, and allows you to spoof your IP address to view content that is restricted to a certain geographic location. While there are plenty of other VPN services on the market that offer both a paid and free version of its software, such as AnchorFree's Hotspot Shieldand VPN Direct, CyberGhost VPN (current version is CyberGhost 5) is the first one I've seen where the free version has everything I needed. No need to upgrade to a paid version. That alone makes CyberGhost VPN an Editors' Choice for free VPN services, alongside VPNBook.

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How VPN Services WorkYour computer has an IP address assigned by your ISP which can be used to figure out the geographic location of your ISP's data center. For many of us, it's pretty close to our actual geographic location. If you are concerned about increasing government surveillance or want to foil aggressive advertising, you may want to change your IP address so that it will be harder to trace your online activity. Or you may be trying to access a service that is restricted by geographic region. CyberGhost VPN lets you "change" your geographic location by overriding the IP address assigned by your ISP with one drawn from its pool of servers. I used CyberGhost VPN to connect to both US-based as well as international—well, European—servers.

Even if you are not trying to hide your location, using a VPN service makes a lot of sense because it encrypts all online traffic and ensures data remains hidden from third parties when on an open wireless network. When I looked at the network traffic via Wireshark, I saw my online traffic was encrypted. Like other VPN services, CyberGhost VPN is not intended to replace my corporate VPN to access work-related applications, but it is useful for protecting my overall online activity.

The CompetitionFor the most part, VPN services generally all do the same things. The differences in network speed and features are most marked when comparing paid versions against free versions. Free VPN services tend to be simple to use, usually support only one device, and generally don't have a lot of advanced functionality. Websites may take a little longer to initially load when connected to a VPN service, but it is still tolerable performance. Some free services are ad-supported, while others restrict which servers you can connect to or impose bandwidth caps. CyberGhost VPN displays ads when you connect to a server and inserts a 25-second delay before starting the connection, but other than that, it stays out of your way. While there are no bandwidth caps for the free version of CyberGhost VPN, it does disconnect you after three hours.

CyberGhost VPN comes in three flavors, free, premium, and premium plus. Being a European product, the premium version costs €4.99 per month, which is roughly $6.62, and the premium plus version costs €7.99 per month, or roughly $10.61. The premium and premium plus versions offer better speeds, 250 servers in 20 countries, multi-device support, and the option to use OpenVPN, IPSec or PPTP VPN to connect Linux and Mac devices. The paid version offers iOS, and Android is still on the way. This review and rating focuses on the free version of CyberGhost VPN, which is limited to one Windows device.

To be able to use CyberGhost on non-Windows platforms, or to be able to use one account for multiple devices, you would need to pay for a CyberGhost VPN subscription. While disappointing, multi-device and multi-platform support is generally considered as paid-features, so it's not surprising that CyberGhost doesn't offer them in the free version.

Installation and Getting StartedI downloaded and launched the client software directly from the CyberGhost website, which installed both the client and OpenVPN's TAP-Win32 adapter onto my test machine. I liked the fact that I could use the service right away without creating an account. The account is necessary for the paid version in order to manage multiple devices and access OpenVPN, PPTP and IPSec VPN settings but not needed for the free version.

If you decide to create an account anyway, you just click on the Upgrade button in the client interface or go to "My Account" on the CyberGhost website. At this point, CyberGhost generates a username, a strong password, and a special key for account recovery. You copy the code and store it in a safe place. The only time you need it is if you need to reset the password.

The fact that CyberGhost generates a password and a username on the fly means users always start off with a strong and unique password. Users have the option to later change the username and password to something easier to remember, if they wish. However, the text should be more explicit about the fact that there is no way to reset the account or password if you lose that special key. Other than that, I really liked this approach to account security—Next: CyberGhost VPN Interface and Performance

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Fahmida Y. Rashid is a senior analyst for business at PCMag.com. She focuses on ways businesses can use technology to work efficiently and easily. She is paranoid about security and privacy, and considers security implications when evaluating business technology. She has written for eWEEK, Dark Reading, and SecurityWeek covering security, core Internet infrastructure, and open source.
Follow me on Twitter: zdfyrashid
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